


You were a hero once

by cirque



Category: The Odyssey - Homer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-27
Updated: 2012-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-31 20:01:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Letter to a long-lost father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You were a hero once

You were a hero once.

 

Once, not far from here. Somewhere warm between “yesterday” and “maybe sometime soon.”

 

Back when you were the magistrate of my childhood, a cautionary tale behind every door waiting to be locked. They would hold your stories up to the dying light and read to me until my eyes went numb, until all I knew was danger and savagery. Old tales, told by old minds.

 

But you were the strongest of the lot, not by raw power or by loud voice, wielding weaponry and words to save the day - no, you were strongest in my veins, always beating beneath the slowed compassion of my heart as the pages turned like fruitful quests. And so, words would spill, villains fall, and I would grip the aftermath in distanced hands made ready to catch your hopes as you flung them high from rafters and thunderclouds.

 

I’d sit in the shadow of your victories, your losses, your journeys, your leaps and falls and your world-weathered admonishments. Take up your sword and use it to cut my baby hair.

 

You were part hero, part wolf in my life-dreams, half the perfect warrior they painted you to be, and half a semi-imagined man. Wading through oceans that spanned the unknown worlds, calling to gods and demons and beheading snake-creatures. You were as crazy as I was in the sunrise of childhood, because I took your stories from the book and made them playthings. (Underworld, Olympus, Hades and Zeus locked in combat, everything splintering away into painful confessions of heroic tragedy made to scare young minds into submission - all of it, a game).

 

All heroes are wounded from the start, and from self-preservation and healing comes the heroism. Your scars were more a part of life than myself entire. Your name was signed beneath my own, to say “here is a hero, one day”.

 

Odysseus. You were a hero once (old stories; old minds), once not far from the storm of today.


End file.
